Rustum Kozain’s long awaited debut collection, This Carting Life, is at turns startling, touching, witty and insightful. The multi-award winning poet and essayist collects poems written over a decade, many of which are familiar because they have previously appeared in collections of various types all over the world. Even the less famous ones have a refinement that is signature Kozain. Arranged in four mini-sections – “Home”, “This Carting Life”, “Home Again”, and “Waking” – the poems nestle in the categories and still permit a ‘leaking of meanings,’ as Gabeba Baderoon might say.

Kozain’s poetry is lean: there are no unnecessary explanations or adjectives, but he is never stingy with words. “Home” has speakers who work the Western Cape’s wine districts and reveal the contradictions and streams of wine, blood and water that flow through the psychic and material lives of families, neighbours and lovers. In “Family Potrait”, Kozain draws his reader’s eye into their interiority to reveal the possibilities of everyday living, hoping, breathing, getting into trouble and waking up again. There are the difficulties of connection where “[b]lood thicker than water runs thin/now, hardly holding us together, all of us/flung from poverty, slowly making it” (“Family Portrait” ll. 33-35). Home is not easy even if it is a place with explosions of tenderness and vulnerability. Witness: “I, aware of your age every six months’/visit to you, Mother, stand with one foot on the rim of the grave. Like a pioneer/But you call me your prodigal son” (“Home town, 1992” ll. 60-64).

In the section, “This Carting Life”, Kozain’s personae fall in love with other writers, musicians and thinkers so that the movement – the hard trekking suggested by the signature poem – in the collection is conceptual, rhythmic and idiomatic at the same time that this nomadic existence of his speakers is mirrored in the physical and aesthetic movements of LKJ, Charles Mingus, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, among others. There is a tangible musicality to Kozain’s verse in this section.

Returning to the familiar invites discovery and self-questioning in “Home Again” because here, more so than in “Home”, the meanings of such a place and state are themselves tricky. The familiar architecture of the self becomes strange in poems like “Brother, who will bury me?” and “Conversations with my father”, while another speaker continues to “seek the sentence long enough/ to house my tribe” in “Cape Town, Jerusalem” (ll. 16-17) and thematically in “Cape Town, 1995.”

The final segment, “Waking”, is the most explicitly intimate of the sections. There is a six year old boy gazing lovingly into his father’s face as they walk on “Diaz Beach, Mossel Bay”, the oppressive apartheid intrusion into relationships in “Kingdom of rain” and more dis/connections in “Cape Town, Jerusalem II” and “Winter, 2003.”

The collection, This Carting Life, like the poem it is named for, explores the textures and ruptures of connections: forced, chosen, and sometimes elusive. It delves into the haunting movements of exile, slavery, wine-streams, language and beauty – all the time the difficult business of beauty. These concerns reverberate across the sections, times and geographies of Kozain’s poetry. Here, Rustum Kozain is able to turn his eye and voice to entire lifetimes in textured precision that never veers towards the glibly palatable sound byte. This Carting Life is the kind of profoundly political and exquisite poetry you want to read again and again.

Kozain, Rustum. 2005. This Carting Life. Roggebaai & Plumstead: Kwela & Snailpress.